THE risk of Clackmannanshire Council not having the money to deliver essential services in the next few years remains high with further "significant budget reductions" to come.

That is according to the local authority's Corporate Risk Log, which was recently updated and will be debated at a meeting of the Audit Committee tomorrow (Thursday, June 20).

While the organisational redesign at Kilncraigs is seeking to establish more sustainable service delivery, insufficient pace and scale on this front is also considered an equally high risk.

"Insufficient financial resilience", meaning the council does not have a balanced budget to meet "essential service demands, customer needs or external agendas", scored maximum points in both likelihood and impact on the risk-matrix.

Papers to be tabled at Kilncraigs said: "The cumulative funding gap to 2023 is £23.5million, with continuing need for significant budget reductions.

"Given the significant savings already achieved, it is extremely challenging to identify new proposals and significant priority is being given to progressing the council's organisational redesign and transformational change."

One element of the redesign was the reduction in chief officers and the establishment of senior manager roles at the local authority.

According to a separate report to council, chief officers have been cut down from nine to four and plans are for 15 senior managers, compared to the previous 23 service managers.

However, during the transition within the local authority's People Portfolio some additional roles had to be retained to ensure the safe delivery of services.

A document tabled at full council last week said: "The transitional People portfolio structure does not meet either the staff number or savings projections set out within the March 2018 paper.

"Whilst the transitional structure highlights six senior management roles (in line with the March paper), it also retains four additional grade 11 managers.

"This proposal is based on assessment of current policy priorities and risk within the services."

The paper went on to say that "the proposed number of managers is greater than that agreed by council and there are deferred savings of £363k relative to the March 2018 decision".

A programme manager is a now in post to drive forward the changes, but the risk log warned: "Service redesign currently behind programme and expected savings were not achieved in full during 2018-19."